New York Times best-selling author of Fight Club, which was adapted into a major motion picture, Chuck Palahniuk offers a haunting tale. Winner of the Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Palahniuk is one of the rare literary geniuses who has been able to bridge the gap between a cult following and commercial success.

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Diary: A Novel

Diary takes the form of a "coma diary" kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. It is a dark, hilarious, and poignant act of storytelling from America's favorite, most inventive nihilist.

Rant

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the New York Times best-sellers Fight Club and Lullaby, is known for his edgy novels, and Rant is no exception. Palahniuk presents this fictional biography of Buster "Rant" Casey in a series of vignettes told by the people who knew him best. As intricate as a spider web, Rant succeeds in recounting the story of one man's life only through the eyes of others. But the question remains, "Who was Rant Casey?"

Survivor

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult, is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid-and-collagen-packed media messiah.

Damned

“Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison,” declares the whip-tongued 13-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk’s subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a marijuana overdose—and the next thing she knows, she’s in Hell.

Haunted

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: 23 of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter, sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months", and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them.

Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

For years Chuck Palahniuk has reserved his best storytelling for his readings, often choosing to read a new short story instead of whatever novel he is supposed to be promoting. Make Something Up compiles these previously unpublished tales for the very first time, plus the Byliner social media insta-classic "Phoenix" and Palahniuk's most notable pieces from Playboy.

Beautiful You

From the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged contemporary male psyche, now comes this novel about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of female pleasure. Beautiful You is Palahniuk's much-anticipated satire of the emerging erotic thriller genre, a mash-up of mommy porn and chick lit à la Sex and the City, and fantasy lit à la Clan of the Cave Bear. Imagine if Ira Levin had a baby with Jean Auel.

Pygmy

"Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67, on arrival Midwestern American airport....Code name: Operation Havoc." Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the U.S. disguised as exchange students to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified attack of massive terrorism

Invisible Monsters

She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she is transformed from the beautiful center of attention to an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.

Invisible Monsters Remix

Injected with new material, Invisible Monsters Remix fulfills Chuck Palahniuk’s original vision for his 1999 novel, moving a daring satire on beauty and the fashion industry even further into a wildly unique listening experience. Palahniuk’s fashion-model protagonist has it all - boyfriend, career, loyal best friend - until an accident destroys her face, her ability to speak, and her self-esteem. Enter Brandy Alexander, queen supreme, one operation away from becoming a bonafide woman.

Doomed

Madison Spencer, the liveliest, snarkiest dead girl in the universe, continues the adventures in the afterlife begun in Damned. Having somewhat reluctantly escaped from hell, she now wanders the purgatory that is Earth as a ghostly spirit, seeking her do-gooding celebrity parents, fighting the malign control of Satan, recounting the disgracefully funny encounter with her grandfather in a fetid highway rest stop in upstate New York when she - oh, never mind - and climaxing in a rendezvous with destiny on the new, totally plastic continent in the Pacific called, not at all accidentally, Madlantis.

Fight Club

When a listless office employee (the narrator) meets Tyler Durden, his life begins to take on a strange new dimension. Together they form Fight Club - a secretive underground group sponsoring bloody bare-knuckle boxing matches staged in seedy alleys, vacant warehouses, and dive-bar basements. Fight Club lets ordinary men vent their suppressed rage, and it quickly develops a fanatical following.

Tell-All

Hazie Coogan has for decades tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton, a larger-than-life star who has survived multiple marriages, career comebacks, cosmetic surgeries, and emotional dramas. But danger lurks with the arrival of a gentleman caller named Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart and boudoir.

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (Unabridged Selections)

Chuck Palahniuk's world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. These pieces from Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling.

Bluebeard: The Autobiography of Rabo Karabekian (1916-1988)

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life that is heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence.

The Border

It is not just the living ships of the monstrous Gorgons or the motion-blurred shock troops of the armored Cyphers that endanger the holdouts in the human bastion of Panther Ridge. The world itself has turned against the handful of survivors, as one by one they succumb to despair and suicide or, even worse, are transformed by otherworldly pollution into hideous Gray Men, cannibalistic mutants driven by insatiable hunger.

The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins: A Novel

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal-fitness trainer, disarms an apparently crazed gunman chasing two frightened homeless men along a deserted causeway at night, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind. Within hours, Lucy becomes a hero. Her celebrity is short-lived, though: the "crazed gunman", turns out to be a victim of child sexual abuse and the two men are serial pedophiles.

Geek Love

No one wants to be a victim, but most find the event too hypnotic to ignore. In order to save their traveling carnival from bankruptcy, the Binewskis are creating their own brood of sideshow freaks. Under Al's careful direction, the pregnant Lil ingests radioisotopes, insecticides, and arsenic to make her babies "special".

Publisher's Summary

New York Times best-selling author of Fight Club, which was adapted into a major motion picture, Chuck Palahniuk offers a haunting tale. Winner of the Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Palahniuk is one of the rare literary geniuses who has been able to bridge the gap between a cult following and commercial success.

Carl Streator, a 40-something widower and newspaper reporter, has lived a reclusive life since the death of his wife. His latest assignment is to write a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In doing so, he discovers that there is an underlying commonality in the deaths. A children's book, Poems and Rhymes Around the World, containing an African Death chant, is found at the scene of the cases he investigates. Having read the chant aloud, he quickly realizes the lethal power of the words. As he fights against its powerful grip, which has turned him into a serial killer, he enlists the aid of some eccentric compatriots who vow to rid every library and bookstore of the deadly text before further lives are jeopardized. But what begins as a crusade to save lives soon becomes the ultimate game of cat and mouse, as they uncover the truth about the rhyme and are hunted by the force holding Streator captive.

Newsday hails Palahniuk as "one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time." Richard Poe's powerful narration expertly captures every tormented detail of this paranormal thriller.

What the Critics Say

"Hilarious satire." (Publishers Weekly) "Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk." (Kirkus Reviews) "In his last novel, Choke, Palahniuk proved he could write a best seller without sacrificing his trademark biting satire. And in Lullaby, he manages an even more impressive feat by showing himself capable of tenderness as well as outrage." (Booklist) "This is vintage Palahniuk: weird, creepy, twisted, upsetting, and ultimately a great read for anyone who wants to be scared for pleasure." (Library Journal)

Again, Chuck Palahniuk skirts the border of genius versus insanity. "Lullaby" is a spellbinding journey through America, for control. Much more of an action adventure, than the title lets on; this book follows a man, Carl Streator, in his quest to control himself, his companions and the "Big Brother" of our world.

Following the same style of writing as "Fight Club" and "Survivor" Palahniuk fills this book with bits of information that make "Lullaby" consistently interesting, and enhances the story. The audio selection is well read and easy to understand.

Final Point; Great story that I couldn't stop! If you liked any other of Palahniuk's work, then this is a definite read! ~ Enjoy

...except for the film version of "Fight Club", which I thoroughly enjoyed and which had people everywhere telling me, "But you GOTTA read the BOOK!" Somehow I never did - maybe because no one would surrender their copy.

"Lullabye" from Audible seemed like a painless way to experience a new author, and having now done so, I'm reminded of a reviewer of Richard Brautigan's novels in the late 1960s, who wrote, "Someday, people will no longer be said the write 'novels' - instead they will write 'Brautigans'."

"Lullabye" is the first "brautigan" I've read in decades, and a fine example it is. Inventive and intense, it might be easy for the un-brautiganized reader to fret about the dangerous world Chuck P. has created, which writhes and pulses in your hands like the fresh meat it really, really is. Not to worry, Gentle Reader, you can trust this man. He's a professional.

I'm glad that ALL writers aren't like Chuck Palahniuk, but I very, very happy that HE is.

PS: Very nicely read for the Audible version, too. The perfect tone, which can't have been easy to find, or maintain.

Love him or hate him, Palahniuk???s books seem to have a common theme. In them, modern culture is cast as something of a terminal malady, a cancer rapidly consuming both the Earth and the original human spirit. For his characters, the only release is through some form of anarchic lashing out.

In Fight Club, it was young men rediscovering their smothered masculinity through basement brawls and acts of civil destruction. Here, the story revolves around a supernatural device, a lullaby hidden in an obscure children???s book that has the power, when read, or even thought, to kill. The book???s oddball protagonists (including two characters dealing, in their own strange ways, with having accidentally killed their own families with the lullaby, and a hilariously obnoxious young vegan nudist) set off on a quest to destroy, through trickery or mayhem, every last copy of the book, but, this being Palahniuk, much consideration is also given to the idea of simply using the lullaby to put modern society out of its misery.

The key to reading Chuck P is to accept that his books are wildly implausible and over-the-top, both in terms of how his characters act and his own reduction of the world. What Palahniuk does do, though, is shove the reader off balance, bombarding them with betcha-didn???t-know-this factoids and a bleakly humorous treatment of dark subject matter. These quotable little nuggets of twisted insight and wit are really what you get for the price of admittance, even more so than the story itself.

Compared to Fight Club, I did find this book a bit chaotic. What plot there is is thin and makes a lot of swift turns, which had me checking my audiobook a few times to see if I???d accidentally missed some piece of information (nope). It may test the patience of non-devotees. But, on the other hand, the chaos are part of the experience and it???s not a long read. All in all, I enjoyed it. Palahniuk is his own institution (in both senses of the word) and a good break from tamer, blander novels.

Although this book has it's flaws I found it a fun book to listen to in my car going to and from work. I really think that this author has his mind somewhere else other than earth and this book is proof. Everything in this book from the story to the descriptions of events are off-the- wall bizarre. HOWEVER, I have NEVER had so much fun with a book and I look forward to reading more from this guy! Long story short is that the book has it's flaws but it's kind of like a Jackie Chan movie..........terrible but wonderful at the same time!

This was an interesting book. I was uncertain whether it was a satire or the wanderings of someone who is losing their mind. While I probably would not read another book by this author, I must admit that it was a change of pace for me. From that perspective, I would recommend it as a choice. The characters were odd, the situations they found themselves in bordered on insanity and impossiblity just enough to draw me back to listen. I thought the author did a nice job of creating a story that kept one's interest even though it was the kind of "sick" interest one might have when driving past an accident on the highway.

Where does Lullaby rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I have listened to Lullaby ATLEAST 10 times now. This one will not get old. My favorite CP reading hands down.

What did you like best about this story?

All around I loved this story. Very witty. In the second chapter his rant about quiet-ophobics is so damn beautiful, hilarious, and on point. It is a story that is always moving only taking time to nitpick at the abstract details of the story. There is no fluff in this book in my humble opinion. The voice actor is brilliant in this too. He paces very well through the book and nails every nuance of CP's writing. I am thoroughly impressed.

Any additional comments?

I would HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a damn kooky story told in a way that is perfect for the book. You don't feel like you are listening, you are there with him.

I liked the fast and efficient plot delivery of this book - the author didn't waste a lot of time on superfluous detail - he just jumped right into the meat of the story. The characters are bizarre and they take each other through a gruesome adventure that reminds me of a modern day B-horror flick. There's spirits, witchcraft, ancient voodoo, perversions with corpses, and a buttload of death. If a well-crafted horror masterpiece is a six course gourmet dinner, then consider this book your favorite drive-thru burger and fries value meal with a chocolate milkshake to wash it down.

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